Project Upcycle

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Cars are getting harder and harder to break into. This can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing depending on your situation. For instance: I have the best commercial van on the market, a Chevy Express, and it requires a chipped key. I can cut a key exactly the same as my key, and it will turn on the lights, radio, open the doors...Everything but start the car! DOH!

Here's the lowdown on MOST transponder keys: You don't program the key, you program the vehicle! You can go to your dealer and they will charge you $200 to copy the current transponder, home depot will
do it for around $100, OR you can simply teach your vehicle to recognize both!

It's totally not about the gifts, but it is a tradition to go over to my sisters house for Christmas and she usually picks some pretty useful gifts! My mom (You can call her Grand) got a MAXMADE 11,000 mAh charger for her tablet and phone, but what makes this unit awesome is the jumper cable attachment that will allow it to put out up to 400 amps of power to start your car when the battery is low.

She can plug her Tablet and Phone in at the same time using the 2 amp and 1 amp usb ports.
I used it to charge my Syma X13 Mini Quadcopter and it worked great! I could take it out to the park and be charging six batteries, AT THE SAME TIME with the Maxmade while another one is being used in the copter to extend your flying time out in the field! 5 minutes per flight x 7 batteries + 6 minutes to cool down between discharging and charging / 30 minutes per charge = CONSTANT FLYING TIME!!! Fly until YOU want to go in. Way better than most one battery setups that can be flown for 5 minutes, cooled down for another 5 and have to be charged for 30. Thats like 14% flying time vs 100% flying time.

Depending on what charger you use it can take from 6-12 hours to charge but it can recharge my favorite Galaxy Note 2 several times before being completely drained. It even comes with a leather zip-up pack to protect the unit and all the cables in one neat unit that can slide under your seat!

Thursday, December 24, 2015

I have been wanting to develop a course
to teach kids to cook using Spartan
Supper, but I quickly found out that kids don't want to learn if
they think it is a chore. It's like homework, It seems like something
that you have to do in order to get on to the next day. This is
counter productive and kids get hooked on the
pink slime used as a filler in non organic meat products. This
got to be such a big deal that Mcdonalds stopped using it to avoid a
public boycott. Education for the win!

Health Points and Gold:

So how do you make cooking fun? Make it
a game. Eating healthy, nutrient dense food is cheaper than buying
the equivalent easy and fast foods to get your nutrients. So eating
healthy not only gives you health points, but it also gets you more
gold! Leaving you more cash at the end of the year for whatever
bonus things you want to do or buy.

Bonus Level:

In the two months since switching over
to a nutrient dense diet from Spartan Supper, I have saved over $200
on groceries. If I keep this up all year, that's $1200 in savings
that I can spend on me. Want acupuncture and massage every month
until next year? Why not! Want to fly to New York for a shopping
trip? No problem, Hire a guy to follow me around for a month and give
me foot rubs while I work? Done! It's MY money, I worked long and
hard to earn it, and damnit I am not just going to throw it away on
unnecessary food because I'm too lazy to use one
app to eat healthy!

THE RULES:

This list will change as I revise them
to make more sense. If you have suggestions on a rule that should be
added or changed let me know in the comments below and I will address
it!

To calculate your health points: For
the next two months, enter everything that enters your mouth into a
recipe on the DIY-Soylent website.
It will give you a percentage complete based on your nutritional
profile. Average out the percentage complete for 60 days and this is
your Health points. (Add them all up and divide by 60)

For example, if you wanted to Start
with a score of 100, you could use Spartan
Supper to generate your menu for 60 days. It will assemble 100%
nutritionally complete minimalist menus to save you time and money
while maxing out your health points.

In the past 60 days:

If you have consumed High Fructose Corn
Syrup (in most sweet & cheap things like soda) subtract 10 points

If you used tobacco or alcohol subtract
30 points each

If you have used hard drugs (Meth,
Crack, Pharmaceuticals, Molly, etc) in the last five years, subtract
50 points

For every 5 minutes of exercise/high
aerobic activity in your day, add one health point

Aerobic activity helps activate your
lymphatic system which helps detoxify your body. Taking fully deep
breaths also helps your lymph nodes function. You want to get dizzy?
Breathe in and out fully for 30 breaths. This will alkalize your
blood and make you dizzy, but don't do it very often or you will lose
health points. You are better off exercising because it will also
release endorphins which will make you happy!

Remember, don't make it a chore or it
wont be fun. Try incorporating more activity into your day. Take the
stairs over the elevator and learn more about free running because it
makes getting around so much more fun. At that point the world
becomes your playground.

“But I have to work! I don't have
time for that!”

So dance! It is an incredible
emotionally expressive workout that almost everyone finds attractive
in a partner. It will make your life more loving. You can dance with
a cold heart, but you won't be having very much fun.

OH MY GOODNESS PEOPLE! I was
babysitting for a few friends kids and when it came time to make
food, not one of them knew how to cook pasta (Isn't spaghetti and meatballs one of the staple foods to teach your kids?), Really they didn't know anything
about food for that matter. What you eat is a direct correlation to
your chronic health. If you eat crap, you are going to live a crap
life. If you eat fit, you will live a fit life.

Your food is your fuel, your body
derives it's energy from what you put down your throat. Whole
ingredients are chewed. This breaks the food down and creates more
surface area while mixing in enzymes in your saliva that begin the
digestion process before your food even hits your stomach. Remember
how your mother told you to chew your food? This is what she was
talking about.

Chewing makes your food more available
to be absorbed. Unchewed food remains in chunks in your stomach and
doesn't break down completely. So even though you ate, because you
didn't chew well, its like you ate half.

How much food do you waste because you
don't chew? What nutrients are you getting from the food you do chew?

A Big mac? Or sweet potatoes with
onions and green beans? With the same calories: One is high in
saturated fats and hydrogenated oils while the other is high in
Fiber, Omegas 3 & 6, Vitamin A, B1, B5, B6, Potassium,
Phosphorus, Manganese, Magnesium, and MORE!

So how do you teach your kids to cook
when you don't know what foods add up to complete nutrition?

If you guessed Spartan
Supper: You are RIGHT! Spartan
Supper will generate a nutritionally complete set of ingredients
that YOU have to find a way to combine and make delicious food.

Think of it as a game where, if you win
you get to live a long happy healthy life looking absolutely
beautiful from the day you are born until the rest of forever!

What
is the catch? You can't stop playing this game. In fact, you are
playing right now but you don't know your score. Every time you eat
food with added sugar, you lose health points. Every time you eat
foods with hydrogenated oils, you lose health points. Every time you
eat sausage, you lose health points. It seems fine until you are 50
years into the game and you are running out of health points fast.

Spartan
Supper makes minimalist diets. This means a minimal ingredient
lists of nutrient dense foods. The benefit to this is being able to
add other foods to reach your ideal Calorie count.

There are so many different flavors
available to put together in different ways that taste A-MAZING! For
instance there is this fruit called Durian that smells like stinky
feet and tastes like sweet creamy goodness. Add a goat cheese feta
and toss over sweet buttery infant spinach (Start with a few
tablespoons of spinach
seeds in a wide
mouth mason jar with a sprouting
lid, allow to grow until it looks like little spinach grass) top
with Himalayan
Sea Salt and enjoy. It's like a party of flavor in your mouth and
all of your taste buds are invited!

Seriously, don't be afraid to try
different foods together and chew them well. The flavors will
completely transform in your mouth. So sit down and try to take note
of the gastronomic journey you are about to embark on for the next 50
chews.

Spartan Supper is trying to raise funds
for a front end developer to make the app faster and more user
friendly. You would be AWESOME if you could do your part to make apps
like this more available to the community. Please follow
them on Twitter and share links
to their page to help!

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

A friend of mine recently got a Syma
S107 RC helicopter for her boyfriend. I can't put it down. Every
time we go see her it's the first thing I go for and I play with it
for almost as long as we are over there. It is fun, it's small, easy
to fly, and it was only $20 shipped with Amazon prime! This isn't
some $1,500 drone that you don't want to fly because it costs as much
as your first car. If you crash this and it breaks (which I have yet
to do in the entirety of my crash career with it) it's only $20 and
two days for a brand new one. These things are popular enough that
you can get spare or upgraded parts for almost all of it.

It
plugs into a usb charger or you can charge it off your controller
batteries. (Which
is why you get rechargeables!) With the RAVPower
16,000 mah battery pack that I use for my phone I can charge this
helicopter almost 100 times before I run out of juice and have to
recharge. (there is an upgraded
battery pack that has 2000mah more power and can get you an extra
10 charges) If I am near power I usually just plug in my smart
wall charger and charge it off wall power for UNLIMITED FLY TIME!
Just kidding! The battery would wear out after a certain number of
cycles.

PRO TIP: ALWAYS WAIT 10 MINUTES between
charging your batteries and using the helicopter to prolong battery
life.

I have had an enormous amount of fun
with this little helicopter, and if you do eventually crash it and
break it (Which I have not managed to do) You can take it apart and
replace the parts or use it as a spare parts copter for the next one
you get.

You can strip it down to the bare bones
for added flight time and a look into how simple a drone is to build!
This one is two motors spinning two blades in an aluminum chassis.
The blades are flexible and very impact resistant, so there is little
to break and a bunch to learn.

I would easily say this is the best
remote controlled toy for the money in 2015.

Do you have a sweet, sub $30 drone/copter/flying thing that we should know about? Leave a comment!

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

I have talked in previous posts about
Spartan Supper pulling ingredients from the USDA nutritional database
and creating a nutritionally complete set of foods to consume for the
day. There are 1,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations and not
all of them will taste like the next big shake, but out of a
quadrillion recipes you are bound to find a few you like.

I personally enjoy this nutritionally
complete shake.

It costs roughly $60-70 (as of Dec 2015) for enough
ingredients to meet the nutritional requirements for two people for a
week. The ingredients are prepared and bagged on day one so days 2-6
are (add ingredients, add water, blend for 15 seconds and serve, then
fill blender with water, add a drop of antibacterial soap, then blend
again, rinse, and dry! It really is that easy.

As an added bonus, if you use wide mouth pint mason jars, you can split the shake up into three, four, six, or however
many meals you want for the day and keep them in the fridge! The lids and rings that come with them will usually rust pretty quickly which I don't usually mind unless I can taste it. When I went to buy replacement lids I got these BPA FREE lids with these silicone seals for a leak proof dishwasher safe combo that works great!

The majority of my day is spent on the
move. There are mornings when I negotiate not eating breakfast in
order to hit the snooze button one more time. Not healthy because I
am almost always hungry. Until the hunger subsides and I start
running off my fats (good thing I try to only eat healthy long
chained ones!) My eating schedule is erratic and I never know when I
am going to have time to get something wholesome to eat.

Recently I invested in a Vitamix 7500 and I
am more than happy with the results. I have a blender that I rarely
use, but the vitamix is a whole different beast altogether. I use
it every single day, sometimes multiple times per day. But when I tell people it's a $500 blender they look at me and laugh. "COME ON!" they say, "Why would you ever spend $500 on a blender? You can get a ninja for less than $100!"

If the $500 price tag is sticker shock for you, consider getting a factory refurbished unit which would save you almost half of the cost (and you don't have to tell anyone...mine is!) It comes with an EIGHT YEAR WARRANTY and did I mention
it's MADE IN AMERICA, BY AMERICANS (Unlike some countries where people aren't treated like people.). They are expected to last 25+
years with daily use and many see life beyond that!

It can make the flavors of a little garlic and
rosemary and basil pop in a marinara. I can whip eggs with cilantro,
jalopeno, garlic, and onion in my favorite Kerrygold butter in five
seconds. With a vitamix you can bring out a lot of flavor from a
little spice.

Almond milk without soy lecithin! It is known that Soy lecithin affects our estrogen levels (SOURCE), but it is not known exactly how. Soy lecithin is an emulsifier (helps keep peanut butter and almond milk from separating) and it is cheap, so it is in many processed products. I put 3 parts water to 1 part whole almonds in the vitamix and make PURE Almond milk! If you dislike the almond pulp that remains after blending you can filter it through a nut milk bag and get all the chunks out!

Flours are another awesome thing you
can do.

My grocery store sells barley (high in
manganese, molybdenum, selenium, fiber, copper, b1, b3, chromium,
phosphorus, and magnesium.), but it is whole shelled kernels so you
usually have to soak them before adding them to a shake. Not with a
Vitamix. You can put a pound of grains into the vitamix and turn it
to high, the vitamix will pulverize the kernels into barley flour
that can be measured and spooned into a shake, or kneaded into bread,
barley pancakes, whatever.

Butters! I havent tried making cow milk
butter, but if you put peanuts in a vitamix and turn it on you get
chopped peanuts. The higher the number the finer the chop until you
turn it high enough to make peanut better. Look on the side of your
peanut butter jar, there is usually sugar (or worse, High Fructose
Cron Syrup) some hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil (which will statistically lead to higher chances of cardiovascular problems) and even with all of these fillers and stabilizers it's
still sold as a premium product!

Peanuts and a Vitamix are cheaper in
the long run and WAY better for you. No hydrogenated oils, no filler.
Just peanuts, or almonds, or cashews, or hazlenuts, even mix and
match to suit YOUR tastes. Not some company with a bottom line's
tastes, they like the way money tastes. Have you tasted money? It
tastes like shit, and for good reason! One in ten bills has fecal
colony forming bacteria on it. Gross.

My favorite things to make in the
Vitamix are smoothies. 1 bag of smoothie ingredients that you prepped
ahead of time and froze. 1 cup of hot water, milk, kefir, etc. it has
to be hot to help unfreeze some of the ingredients so you don't just
make a fruit and vegetable ice cream. Which reminds me.

Ice creams/frozen yogurts/sorbets etc
are all a flick of the switch away in a vitamix. If you throw frozen
cherries and a teaspoon/tablespoon of cacao powder into the vitamix
and turn it up, you vill quickly get chocolate cherry sorbet without
the added crap to make it shelf stable!

Heck if you add straight ice cubes and
turn it to 10 it will make snow! Add tomatoes and salt, turn it to 10 and leave it for 5 minutes to make STEAMING HOT TOMATO SOUP! It's nuts.

This is getting back to nutrition! Your
mother should have told you, chew your vegetables completely before
you swallow. Chewing is an appetite suppressant AND it breaks down
your food creating more surface area for the bacteria in your gut to
get in there and prepare the nutrients for absorbtion. The Vitamix
creates lots of surface area and if you add some nuts at the end of
the shake they will come out in bigger chunks so you can chew on them
as you drink.

*OPTIONAL Add a handful of Peanuts at
the end for a nut benefit bonanza that satiates you as you chew!

NOTE: this isn't something you can or
should slam in one sitting. Your body can only absorb so many
nutrients at a time so spacing things out into several (3-6) meals is
better for you.

PREPARATION:
On grocery day bust out
your kitchen scale and quart/gallon freezer bags. I like this
scale because it looks clean and has a stainless steel measuring
bowl for measuring and mixing.

Measure out each ingredient and put it
in your bags. Move the bags to the freezer when you are preparing a
new ingredient so you don't start wild fermenting your smoothies on
your counter while you prep! When you get to barley, you can get
barley flour, or if you have a Vitamix just add the kernels and turn
it up to eleven! The tamper helps circulate stuck ingredients but
make sure you start with a dry container. Vitamix sells a
flour/drygoods container, but unless you need to make light and fluffy flours like Caputo 00 I use the under the cabinet container
that came with mine and it works just fine! I have no doubt the
standard high and tight container will work equally well. If you want to go all out, THIS KIT has a Vitamix 7500, wet container, dry container, two personal containers, tamper, the baking cookbook, AND the Vitamix cookbook.

Once you have your mixes portioned out
you can open the freezer once per day, grab a bag of mix and fill a mason jar
with hot water. Put both into the vitamix and turn it on. How much
water you add determines the consistency so find out how much you
like.

I like snacking so I split my banana
intake to two in the shake, three during the day. I usually eat the
hard boiled eggs separate because I love them, it is barely
distinguishable when you add it with everything else, there is A LOT
of flavor going on.

If you are afraid of trying new
ingredients, adding them to a shake like this will help you ease into
it until it is second nature. My server at subway told me she was
afraid of spinach in a smoothie because it is healthy.

One Banana, Spinach, Peanut and hemp
seed smoothie later I had changed her mind. Booyah wholesome foods!

You made it all the way to the bottom of this passion rant about my love for Spartan Supper and my Vitamix. I would suggest you check out both because I am very happy with them.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

I posted earlier about
Macronutrition; the Protien, Carbohydrates, and fats that fuel your
internal industries.

You CAN survive off just carbs protiens
and fats, but you probably won't live very long, and if you aren't
getting vitamins and minerals, you will probably get scurvy or have a
stroke. Remember that old saying, “Put a rainbow of foods on your
plate”? No? Maybe it was just my mom, but she had a point.

Your body needs a whole lot more than
carbs, protien, and fat to run efficiently. Vitamins, and minerals,
and trace elements oh my! You need:

28+ things to keep track of and intake every few days? My goodness
this food thing is getting complicated! No wonder everyone has
cancer! Nobody taught us to cook/eat well! This needs to change.

I
started putting together foods that went well together AND were
nutritionally complete, but this can take a lot of time, and you have to
buy two weeks worth of the same meal for you to not have much waste. So
you'd better have/get a chest freezer! I like chest freezers because
hot air rises and cold air falls. When you open the freezer doors in a
conventional stand up freezer, the cold air falls to your feet and room
temperature air rushes into the freezer to fill the space. When you shut
the door the compressor has to kick back on to remove the heat you
added to the freezer when you opened the door and all the cold air fell
out. With a chest freezer you have a box of cold air you reach into from
the top. Some cold air may be displaced when you open the door from the
top, but it cant fall out. YOU SAVE MOST OF THAT LOST COLD AIR!. I wrote a post about how you can turn a chest freezer into a chest frigerator. You can read it HERE.

SPARTANS! TONIGHT WE DINE....WELL!

PRESENTING SPARTAN SUPPER!

I found a website called Spartan Supper. A program that will crawl the US Agriculture National Nutrient Database
For Standard Reference and assemble one day's worth of food based on
your needs. It also keeps the nutrients in the Goldilocks zone so you
don't eat too much or too little of each nutrient!

It is currently in development so they need you to follow them on twitter, and share a link with your friends
so they can launch a kickstarter to make the program more user
friendly!